The PapierMch Toolkit

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The Papier-Mâché Toolkit
Automation need not require getting rid of paper
strips. We suggest keeping the existing paper
flight strips as physical objects. (Wendy
Mackay, Paris-Sud University)

• Document, Image and Voice Analysis Research Group
  (DIVA)
• Department of Informatics (DIUF), Faculty of
  Science
• University of Fribourg, Switzerland
• Pedro de Almeida, Dominique Guinard, Martin Eric
  Ritz

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Introduction (I)
The paper is dead, long lives the paper!

• paperless office owing to the technological
  progress paper will disappear from the desks and
  offices
• Statistics paper does not decrease, but increase
• Result paperless office is a myth
• BUT paper-saturated office is not a failing of
  technology it is a validation of our expertise
  with the physical world
• Question how to better integrate the physical
  and electronic worlds by building physical
  interfaces?

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Introduction (II)

• Answer Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) augment
  the physical world by combining everyday physical
  objects with digital information
• BUT Currently only some experts can build TUIs
  because of the difficult acquisition and
  abstraction of physical input.
• Papier-Mâché, was developed to simplify the
  developing of tangible interfaces.

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Papier-Mâché (I)

• The expression has two meanings
• Technique for creating forms by mixing wet paper
  pulp with glue or paste. The crafted object
  becomes solid when the paste dries. Papier-Mâché
  was originated by the Chinese.

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Papier-Mâché (II)

• The expression has two meanings
• Papier-Mâché stands for a toolkit for building
  tangible interfaces using computer vision,
  electronic tags and barcodes.

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Papier-Mâché (III)

• But, what does tangible user interfaces has
• to do with a handicraft technology

?
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Papier-Mâché (IV)

• probably it points on the characteristic of the
  Toolkit to be able to join several individual
  elements simply to a whole one.
• During their practical attempts the developers
  used scraps of paper with different symbols which
  served as control units by the optical
  recognition.

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Installation

• Before installing the Papier-Mâché Toolkit
• Install Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 ,
  the Java Media Framework and Java Advanced
  Imaging.
• Install a CVS client Netbeans (integrated CVS
  support)
• if necessary Install Phidgets SDK for RFID /
  Java TWAIN for use a TWAIN source
• Make the Papier-Mâché Source-Forge CVS repository
  accessible from Eclipse
• Set the project in Eclipse to be J2SE 5.0
  compliant.
• To use a camera first run the JMRegistry
  application.
• To use RFID add the lib folder of Papier-Mâché to
  your path.

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Functions (I)

• The Papier-Mâché toolkit aims at providing
  toolkit level support for physical input.
• Advantages
• enables developers to build TUIs quite fast
• permits to adapt the underlying sensing
  technologies with a small expenditure of time.
• Therefore a developer has two main tasks
• declaring the input that he want to process
• and associate it to application behaviour.

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Functions (II)

• Papier-Mâché supports computer vision, electronic
  tags (e.g. RFID tags), and barcode (includes 2D
  variants) input
• Vision is the most flexible and powerful of these
  technologies it supports any camera with a
  standard driver, from simple webcams to
  high-quality 1394 cameras.
• Papier-Mâché represents a physical object as a
  PHOB.

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Functions (III)
X

• a PHOB?!

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Functions (IV)

• Phobs (Physical Objects) contain an array of data
  elements (such as an RFID tag) and an array of
  properties (e.g. location).
• The toolkit provides a monitoring window which
  displays the current input objects, image input
  and processing, and behaviors being created or
  invoked with the association map.
• programmer only responsible for selecting input
  types. gt no need to discover the attached input
  or to establish a connection to them.
• Once he has selected an input device,
  Papier-Mâché generates events representing all
  state changes of the corresponding sensor.

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Functions (IV)

• Event types are the same for all different
  technologies. (facilitates technology
  portability)
• Events can be filtered using EventFilters.
  Currently there are three implemented
• MeanColorClassifier filters objects whose colour
  is within distance e of a given colour.
• ROIClassifier filters objects in a particular
  region of interest of the camera view.
• SizeClassifier filters objects whose size is
  within a Euclidean distance e of an ideal size.

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Functions (V)

• While all technologies have the same events,
  each technology provides different types of
  information about the physical objects it senses
• RFID tag ID and the reader ID
• Vision provides the size, location, orientation,
  bounding box, and mean colour of an object
• Barcodes provide the ID, the type (EAN, PDF417,
  or CyberCode), and a reference to the barcode
  image, which allows vision information such as
  location and orientation.

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Possibilities and borders

• Papier-Mâché enables programmers to program an
  application with knowing not more than Java.
• but within Papier-Mâché, the processing is bound
  by the image processing computations
• On an ordinary computer, Papier-Mâché runs at
  interactive rates. The developers of the toolkit
  report that during their tests a dual Pentium 4
  running Windows XP was much sufficient for
  topological and spatial applications with
  discrete events. The performance numbers
  indicated by the developers should be considered
  as lower bounds, as the image processing code is
  entirely unoptimized.

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Integration into larger systems

• Papier-Mâché is designed so that it can be used
  to-gether with other toolkits
• Developers give 24 examples of existing tangible
  user interfaces employing paper and other
  everyday objects. In all cases the Papier-Mâché
  toolkit could be useful.
• This shows clearly, that Papier-Mâché can be used
  for a multitude of applications even it supports
  actually only computer vision, electronic tags
  and barcode input exclusively.

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3 Project Service Counter System

• The Service Counter System is an environment with
  the capability of providing counter management
  functionalities through an tangible interface.
• This environment is based on user identification
  and both optical and radio-frequency objects
  recognition. Objects motions will enable the user
  to interact with the counter and, therefore,
  execute actions.

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3 Project Service Counter System
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3.1 Scenario

• The Library Assistant

1. Detect and identify user
2. Identify book
3. Choose an action
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3.2 Required Components

• Hardware
• An interactive board
• A digital Camera
• RFID Sensor
• RFID Transponders
• A PC station

• Software
• Netbeans 5.0 (or another IDE)

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3.3 Installation procedure

• Create a new project under NetBeans.
• Import the Service Counter System project
  (located into the CD-ROM).
• Connect the digital camera and the RFID sensor
• Run file  ServiceCounterSystem.java  as an JAVA
  application under NetBeans.